He Was An Odd Young Man WHo DIsliked Beets

Menu

WORZELS’ STORY- Just a Bit Of It- as told to Godfrey.

“Where did your poetry begin?” ,Godfrey asked. Worzel lay back in the grass, looking to the clouds to explain. She said sometimes a poem comes along for me as would a train…not with a rumble or distant moan , but more like a light when I am alone.

Growing into a glow, growing warm from a spark, through the prairie dark and valley to town. When the poem calls I must stop and write it down. Then when thought has passed and gone again, sometimes I think of my old home, two blocks down from the C.P. main.

Ugly and old sat the house alone, between a car-lot and Strilchuks’ Funeral Home. I had a fireplace and my turquoise chair, and discovered there was poetry in the house, the happy years I lived there.

It was drafty in the long, bitter winters, hot and stuffy the summer night. But it was alone in the old stucco house, content in my chair I would write.

I wrote “The Westbound Outhouse”, I wrote Grandmas’ on the Tracks Wandering Loose” I wrote “The Salmon Carcass” and the “Ballad of Walter Waving From The Caboose” I wrote my best work, “Sweet Smelled The Slough”, I was inspired by the slow moving freights, which rumbled by two blocks away, rattling my glasses and plates.

A brief yet heady time for a girl, then came the Fall Fair Wurzel- Hurl, a blur, a shout the thump of a beet, and when I came to. My life changed Forever, Godfrey, as I lay in the shade looking up through the haze, at you.